Shane Montgomery: Air Purity, Inc.

Reviewed by Christopher Stout

Gallery Statement:

Parodying the hyperbolic
tone of market-driven fads (e.g., Pokeman, Susan Summer's Thighmaster,
etc.), Shane Montgomery's 'Air Purity Inc.' is an ongoing project that
uses a fictitious company and its products as a metaphor to question notions
of social space and social interaction. Through absurdist, quasi-fascist
sloganeering to promote 'lifestyle products' promising the unobtainable
ideal of 'pure air,' Montgomery's project investigates the fear of impurity/contamination
underlying cultural hermeticism. Ultimately, 'Air Purity Inc.' posits the
liquidity of air--its ability to flow through and around barriers, to occupy
space around us and even inside us--as a model for a breaking down socially
constructed notions of division and autonomy.

On a surface level, Air Purity, Inc.
displays a business strategy sophistication that would render many developing
corporations utterly jealous: naming, branding, market base, demographic,
marketing plan, style bible, product solution--mavens in the strategy industry
would laud this corporation as "spot on." And well so, the message
and benefit of Air Purity has been carefully crafted and launched by
founder Shane Montgomery.

--but crazy oxymoron, in studying
Montgomery's bio, there is no mention of tenure at Accenture, no ivy league
masters degree in business development, not even a listed stint at a local
web-incubator like Razorfish or Liquid Thinking.

Shane Montgomery is an artist.

Shane Montgomery has built Air Purity,
Inc. as his propaganda machine. Underneath the sleek lines of brilliant
marketing lies a cleverly hidden message about the invasive power of such
entities as corporatism, religion, politics, and society in general.

While many of Shane Montgomery's previous
works tended to explore more personal issues of self insecurity and doubt,
Shane makes a didactic statement about the power of outside forces upon
the individual. People crave many things: community, acceptance,
validation. Your mom knows this, but unfortunately, many marketing people
know this too. People also share many common fears: death, sickness, unpopularity,
and many times organizations will use what you are scared of to manipulate
your spending or your actions.

Shane Montgomery has taken the plentiful
air that we breathe and re-branded it, through the propaganda tactic of
paranoia, as something to be filtered, tested, feared. There are
no blue skies at Air Purity Inc., only rats, micro-biological diseases,
smog, pollutants, toxicity levels, plague, and strong-armed rhetoric about
how the effects of breathing dangerous air can be averted by purchasing
the elaborate filtering machine and testing products of Air Purity, Inc.

As the couch sized filtering device
bellows it's vacuum-like rumbling--with it's 40 foot filtration ducts extended,
a video explains the world history of airborne disease, the dangers of
breathing unfiltered air, and the solution offered by Air Purity. Pictures,
diagrams, surveys--the lady next to you coughs and you start to feel a
little frantic, when you realize...

It's a joke. The machine isn't
real, the company isn't real. Air Purity, Inc. isn't real.

What is real is the message that the
earth is in some sense polluted by people who will spin your insecurities
into their own gold.